Hey, friends! Barbarella here to talk about dark comedy Hippo, or more accurately to share the conversation I had with Hippo’s director and writer Mark Rapaport. Genuinely funny, this incredible film has the potential to achieve cult status, so long as people take a chance on this black-and-white gem and actually see it. I recommend that they do. Hippo stars Kimball Farley, Lilla Kizlinger, Eliza Roberts, and Eric Roberts as the narrator. It tells the story of two exceptionally different teens being raised by their mother in a somewhat isolated existence. At times, it reminds me of Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth, in the way that the children in Hippo are sheltered, while not in the same extreme way they were in the Greek film, both films make strong points about the detriment of isolation. The two would make a great double-feature, but if you want to jump on this one first, Hippo will be in select theaters November 8.
At any rate, after a night of minimal sleep due to staying out late at the Pink concert, I caught up with Mark Rapaport, and we had a fun chat about the movie. Check it out!
Barbara: Why go black and white with this?
Mark: I've always loved classic movies, but I never thought I would make a movie in black and white until my cinematographer started taking photos of black and white, and I was like, “These are so cool and good, why don't more people shoot in black and white? Maybe we should do something like that.” He was very into that. When it came to making this movie, which was done on a bit of a low budget, you realize you can kind of get the best of both worlds. You can get the artistic exploration of black and white, and also the budgetary help that it provides, which is that you don't need to worry about colors and making your set and props or wardrobe a certain color. You only have to worry about light and contrast. It was a really fun exercise in that. You see all these filmmakers who make their first movies in black and white anyway, and you realize you're in good company. It's okay to do that, even if it's just your first film. I fell in love with it so much, I might want to do it forever. Every film.
Barbara: Well, I mean, one of my favorite comedic films of all time, Young Frankenstein, is black and white. So there you go.
Mark: It plays really well for genre, for weirdness. It's just there's something about black and white.
Barbara: This is your feature directorial debut. How did your experience live up to your expectations?
Mark: To be honest, making the film was a dream come true. I realized what I need to do with the rest of my life, at least as it pertains to my career. It's what gets me out of bed. There's something cathartic about putting bits and pieces of myself out there. I would say it lived up in terms of how satisfying the experience was. Obviously, I was nervous, but you just do it. You go in and surround yourself with a great team and such supportive people. I just had a blast. I produced films before, so I was ready for the no sleep aspect of it. As the producer, I'd always been the last one there, never sleeping. But then I was like, if I don't have a producing team helping me out to pull me off set, I will not sleep. I think as the director, I should sleep. And luckily they did that. They helped me eat and sleep. All my producers were amazing.
Barbara: That's awesome. This movie has the best cinematic sex talk of all time. Would you talk either about writing that scene, directing it, anything? I just want to hear more about that.
Mark: Well, I really appreciate that. Here's the funny part about that, which my mother will deny, but it is true. She gave me a version of that sex talk when I was thirteen or fourteen. I could remember where I was, my room right at the top of the stairs. No one ever gave me a sex talk, and she's like, “Don't go on the internet. Don't watch those things.” I'm like, “How the hell am I supposed to know any of this?" And she's like, “Your father never gave you the sex talk? Really?” He wasn't dead. Growing up, my father was not the guy who was giving me advice. He was a bit absentee some of the time, not all the time. She literally said, “One morning you will wake up in a puddle of goo, and that'll be when you know that you can then have a baby.” That was a big spark for making this whole movie. It was like, “Oh my God, what if me, teenage Mark, was mentally ill, and you told me that? I would've thought I was an alien or something." And we sort of ran with that as the premise of the movie. And then Kimball added his own flair to it because Kimball just had the notion as a child that if you lie naked in a bed next to someone, he thought you could get them pregnant, and that's sex. We both were like, “That's so funny that we were so dumb as kids. Let's have fun with that.”
Barbara: He also got a writing credit on this. How involved was he? Was that on-set or when you were doing read throughs, how did that all transpire?
Mark: We made a short film together before this called Andronicus, which also played at Fantasia, and we quickly became fast friends. During Covid we stayed in touch, and I was like, “Let's write something together.” Hippo was very much a creation of both of ours. He helped really craft his character. We both brought our fantasies to that character, basically. As a co-writer, he was mostly about shaping his character, but he definitely contributed to the rest of the script as well. When you're writing something that's funny and weird, it's fun to have someone to bounce ideas back with. Once on set, he's just an actor. He locks in. He’s Owen Wilson to my Wes Anderson. He wants to be that, and the writing's a bonus to get there.
Barbara: Regarding casting, who came first? Eric Roberts or his wife?
Mark: It's so funny, actually. On this movie, it was his wife, Eliza, but on our previous short film, Andronicus, it was Eric, and his wife was reading for him on the side, and I said, “Who's reading as the mom? She sounds great.” It's like, “Oh, it's my wife, Eliza.” I then wrote this role with Eliza in mind, and I was hoping to get Eric to do the voiceover. I wasn't a hundred percent sure if he'd be available or want to do it, but he did, and it was great.
Barbara: I'm normally not a fan of voiceover, but it was so effective in this. It was hilarious.
Mark: Thank you. I really appreciate that. I agree, voiceover can be a lot. You got to have fun with it or else it's just….We did a lot with it.
Barbara: Hippo’s very influenced by video games. What kind of video games did you play as a kid and how influenced were you by those?
Mark: As a kid, I definitely played a lot of Nintendo 64 and Game Boy. That was the time period we were trying to capture with Hippo, although in the late nineties, I was not as old as Hippo, but that was the energies. I played Super Smash Brothers. I also played all GTAs on the PlayStation Xbox. But Body Harvest, that game in the movie, was not something I played a lot of. It was something Kimball had known of, and we thought it'd be funny and also less legally risky to pick a more obscure game that not many people have heard of. And the title was so good, Body Harvest, that you didn't have to know anything about the game to know that if your child is playing that, and they take it too seriously, maybe you should be worried about that.
Barbara: I wasn't even sure if it was a real game or not.
Mark: It is. It's not great.
Barbara: What was your favorite day on set and why?
Mark: It was the days with Darwin [Jesse Pimentel], I would say. The Darwin dinner table scene when they were all having dinner, I was dying. We have the script, but we were letting the characters loose a little bit. I just remember every interaction between Darwin and Hippo, the milk was spilling out of my nose, so to speak. I just couldn't keep it together. So that was definitely, yeah, that was definitely my favorite day. Just good vibes.
Barbara: You wear a lot of hats on this. What was your favorite hat to wear?
Mark: My favorite hat is directing because you finally get to make those choices, and you don't have to worry about the million ways a scene could go because it just went. Also, you picked the clothes they're wearing. You picked everything, and they're set in stone. That said, it's my favorite thing, but I will say the writing to me is the most important. If I wasn't confident in my script, I'd have nothing. So I think I value the script writing. I'm more anxious about the script writing, so it's not as fun because I really want to nail the script. I don't want to show up to set and not know how a movie's going to end or what's going to happen in the scene. Some people can do that and improvise, but I have to have a plan for the story.
Barbara: How long did it take to write this?
Mark: It took about three to four months.
Barbara: Oh, wow.
Mark: Yeah, we did it pretty fast.
Barbara: It's hilarious. It really is.
Mark: Thank you. Thank you so much. It was hilarious and a joy making it
Need a laugh? Check out this dark comedy Hippo in select theaters starting Friday, November 8! It's brilliant. Here's a trailer for you.
